According to the Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection, last year’s trash plant closure has led to an estimated 860,000 tons of waste per year being shipped out of state. “Why would we want to be sending our valuable food scraps, paying a premium to ship it to Pennsylvania when we could divert that material right here to Berlin, Southington?” said DEEP Commissioner Katie Dykes.
Dykes said Connecticut has a number of food processing plants already, such as Bright Feeds in Berlin, which converts food waste into animal feed. There’s also Quantum Biopower in Southington. “We’re taking in food waste materials, and in our case, we’re converting them into renewable natural gas and using that gas as a fuel source,” said Quantum Biopower Vice President Brian Paganini.
One goal of Gov. Ned Lamont’s bill is to implement new infrastructure that can better divert food waste to those places. “We don’t have convenient, affordable, scaled up diversion programs in order to make it really convenient and affordable for businesses or residents or schools to take that valuable material, put it into a separate container at the curb,” Dykes said. “And get it to a place like this.”